MUMBAI—For weeks people have been dying across India. The heat is staggering. It has a weight and presence to it like a living, dangerous thing. I stand in the cool night looking over the tall, lighted buildings and the dark street below. Figures glide from glowing streetlight pools and disappear into black shadow, reappear and disappear again. In the nights I imagine Heat as a living entity, curled up somewhere, waiting to uncoil in the morning, to mate with the heavy air, the humidity, pollution and sun, to come surround and attack—to kill men dead as they toil in the street and slay the aged in their beds. Tonight is different.
The sun rose this morning and its light was ugly and pale. The white hot sky bleached the things it touched and we moved slowly through the machine-cooled air inside. We had planned to explore today, perhaps take the ferry from the Gateway of India to Elephanta Island or rummage through the antiques at Chor Bazaar, but there were chores to do, the quotidian tasks that even in India must be attended
to.
Finally those things were done. It was too late in the day for what we had planned, so we took a cab to the shopping center. There we bought a heavy table cloth of embroidered blue silk and pillows printed with designs of elephants and dancing girls. We ate hot curries at a restaurant and bought fresh paneer cheese, red bananas, pineapple juice and spices at the food market. Laden with bags, walking through an Indian mall with my wife and son, I had a feeling that was almost one of belonging. Kristina called a cab to take us home.
There was a crowd at the entrance. A woman in a uniform was shoving water out the door with a huge squeegee. I thought that someone had spilled the mop bucket. A sound like a river was coming from outside, then a terrific bang and a flash of electric blue. Henry ran from cover and I followed, he danced and jumped in the rain, spinning and laughing and splashing. The world had turned from awful white heat to indistinct colors in grey, falling water. The woman with the squeegee was holding back the first rains of the monsoon.
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